Jacopo Peri: Map

Wikipedia article:

Map showing all locations mentioned on Wikipedia article:

Jacopo Peri

Jacopo Peri (20 August 1561
– 12 August 1633) was an Italiancomposer and singer of the transitional period
between the Renaissance and
Baroque styles, and is often called
the inventor of opera. He wrote the
first work to be called an opera today, Dafne (around 1597), and also the first opera to
have survived to the present day, Euridice (1600).

In the 1590s, Peri became associated with Jacopo Corsi, the leading patron of music in
Florence. They felt contemporary art was inferior to
classical Greek and Roman
works, and decided to attempt to recreate Greek tragedy, as they understood it.
Their work added to that of the Florentine Camerata of the previous
decade, which produced the first experiments in monody, the solo song style over continuo bass which eventually developed into
recitative and aria.
Peri and Corsi brought in the poetOttavio Rinuccini to write a text, and the
result, Dafne, though nowadays thought to be a long way
from anything the Greeks would have recognised, is seen as the
first work in a new form, opera.

Rinuccini and Peri next collaborated on Euridice. This was
first performed on 6 October1600, and, unlike Dafne, has survived to the
present day (though it is hardly ever staged, and then only as an
historical curio). The work made use of recitatives, a new development which went between
the arias and chorus and
served to move the action along.

Peri produced a number of other operas, often in collaboration with
other composers, and also wrote a number of other pieces for
various court entertainments. Few of his pieces are still performed
today, and even by the time of his death his operatic style was
looking rather old-fashioned when compared to the work of
relatively younger reformist composers such as Claudio Monteverdi. Peri's influence on
those later composers, however, was large.